Description:  Principles, theories, and techniques of radar signal processing.  Elements of radar systems; radar equation; sampling and quantization of pulse radar signals; radar waveforms; Doppler processing, target detection; and concepts of synthetiic aperture imaging and beamforming.

Prerequisites:  ECE 306 and ECE 345 or STA 301 or STA 368

Objectives:

• Know the basic elements and principles of radar systems.
• Understand the radar equation.
• Use the radar equation to analyze radars.
• Be able to compensate for doppler shift.
• Use doppler information to improve performance.
• Have knowledge of the principles and concepts pertinent to Synthetic aperture Radars (SARs).

Tentative Topics:

• Elements of a pulsed radar; review of some signal processing concepts; preview of basic radar signal processing.
• Signal models: components of a radar signal; amplitude, frequency and spatial models; clutter and noise models.
• Sampling and quantization of pulsed radar signals; time, frequency, and spatial sampling; quantization; I/Q sampling and imbalance.
• Radar waveforms: matched filter; ambiguity function; pulse burst, frequency modulated, stepped frequency, and phase-modulated waveforms.
• Doppler processing: moving target indiction; pulse Doppler processing; pulse pair processing; clutter mapping.
• Detection fundamentals:  Neyman-Pearson detection rule; likelyhood ratio test; threshold detection for various cases; binary integration.
• Constant false alarm rate detection: cell-averaging CFAR; analysis of CFAR; CA CFAR limitaion; order statistic CFAR.
• Advanced and/or special topics: synthetic aperture imaging; beamforming and space-time adaptive processing; incoherent scatter radar; UWB radar; ground penetrating radar.

During the semester, students will work on two projects which explore some topics of interest in depth.  The first potential project can be on the decoding of incoherent scatter radar signal from the ionosphere.  The second project can be on the construction of an image from synthetic radar data.

Graduate students will work on two projects that will explore the topices in more depth than in undergraduate projects.  In the first project above students can be asked to decode two different types of codes or to eliminate sidelobes in the decoding process.  In the second, students may be asked to take into account of the Doppler effect of the targets.